Once again on race and the 2016 elections
By
Eric London
12 May 2017
The Democratic Party and its official and semi-official “left-wing” supporters are once again claiming that Donald Trump was elected president because white workers are racist.
The Nation’s Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel take up the baton this time in an article titled “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did.”
The authors claim that recently released data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) definitively proves that whites were motivated by racism to support Trump.
McElwee and McDaniel pour scorn on the “dubious nature of 2016 analyses that emphasize white economic anxiety.” They even claim workers’ racism is the cause for their sense of economic insecurity: “among a typical white person, anti-black and anti-immigrant attitudes feed negative perceptions of personal economic hardship.”
Such stupid—and yes, racist—conclusions could only be reached through a toxic mixture of bankrupt politics and anti-scientific manipulation of the supposed data.
McElwee and McDaniel know what they want the data to say and they set about to prove it. They test workers’ racism through a pseudo-scientific “racial resentment scale” based on several provocative questions whose aim is to solicit a racist response, like: “Agree or disagree: Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same.”
As a preliminary matter, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million and did not ride a wave of popularity from any section of the population to win the White House.
But even if one accepts the dubious “racial resentment scale” as a legitimate measure of social backwardness, the ANES data shows…